Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen's 17th studio album is an overtly political affair, with songs that tackle hypocrisy, greed, and corruption set to a musical backing of Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps.

"In America, there's a promise that gets made... called the American Dream, which is just the right to be able to live your life with some decency and dignity. But that dream is only true for a very, very, very few people. It seems if you weren't born in the right place or if you didn't come from the right town, or if you believed in something that was different from the next person, y'know..." With those words, Bruce Springsteen summed up his entire ethos-- searching for the American Dream and coming up short and then searching some more-- during a time of rampant unemployment and disquieting economic inequalities. The year was 1981. Yeah, Bruce has been here before.

Back then, Springsteen expressed his blossoming political awareness as well as the no-way-out stories of his friends back in small-town New Jersey with the stark vignettes of Nebraska. Recorded alone on a four-track, the album hovers like candlelight through a pinhole, its hope-deprived characters somberly trying to reconcile faded dreams with the realities in front of them. The album is an empathetic work with Springsteen's disillusionment coursing through it, offering a personalized stamp on America's Promise, and what happens when that bond becomes weak.

Fast-forward to present day: While the State of the Union may feel familiarly shaky, Bruce Springsteen is attacking his country's hypocrisy, greed, and corruption in an entirely different way on his 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball. The keyword is "attack." Several songs here are polemics from a man who has been betrayed one too many times. "If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight," he threatens on "Jack of All Trades", while nothing less than the sound of shotgun fire is heard at the climax of "Death to My Hometown". Perhaps inspired by the folk songs he covered on 2006's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen fills the first side of Wrecking Ball with his own protest music. Like pretty much everything Bruce does, it's a noble gesture-- biographer Dave Marsh pegged him as "the last of rock's great innocents" in the 1970s, and the title still holds-- but it can also sound misguided.

With Nebraska Springsteen was updating the folk music tradition, whether that was his intention or not. The record was insular and personal, which fit its increasingly splintered times. We Shall Overcome was a communal throwback, but it re-energized its dusty source material with spirited performances and an approachable shagginess that's often eluded Springsteen on record over the past couple of decades. Wrecking Ball guns for such sing-alongs-- its musical roots call back to Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps-- but it fails to support them with ample life.

Part of this can be chalked up to the album's production, which, like nearly all of Springsteen's post-Tunnel of Love material, continually finds a way to professionalize the singer's blue-blooded rawness. While a few E Streeters make cameos here and there, the bulk of the album was played by Springsteen and new studio partner Ron Aniello, whose previous credits include Bruce's wife Patti Scialfa, along with Candlebox, Guster, and Barenaked Ladies. The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons; the "Taps"-like horns on "Jack of All Trades" could be announcing the song's own funeral, and a startlingly bland concluding guitar solo by Tom Morello doesn't help matters. There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

Springsteen never fell into punk's nihilism in its heyday, instead opting for fuller and more ambiguous pictures of the problems of the American working class. So it's odd to hear him rail against those up on "Banker's Hill" in the sort of black-and-white terms that continue to plague and cleave his home country. Not to say he has a moral obligation to tell the banker's story-- he doesn't-- but his lashing anger largely gets the better of him (and his writing) on Wrecking Ball's opening half, from the simplistic thieves of "Easy Money" to the overly broad characterization of "Jack of All Trades". For Springsteen, the Promise has always been a complex notion, and there's beauty in the tangles. Nothing is easy, not joy nor vengeance. There are always repercussions, always second and third and fourth thoughts behind any given action. "The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone," he sings on opener "We Take Care of Our Own", and the plea is unfortunately carried through the record's first five songs.

In that light, Wrecking Ball's back half acts as something of a rescue mission, for Springsteen's soul, and for the album itself. The two best songs are here, and not coincidentally they're the oldest tunes of the bunch, ones that were written with the full E Street Band in mind. Both of them-- "Wrecking Ball" and especially "Land of Hope and Dreams"-- also feature the unmistakable sax blares of Clarence Clemons, who passed away last summer. That added emotional weight certainly contributes to these songs' heft, but so does the fact that they fit in with Springsteen's lifelong mission in a way that the rest of the album does not. "Wrecking Ball" was originally written to pay tribute to the Meadowlands' Giants Stadium in 2009, when Springsteen and the E Street Band played the venue's final concerts. And indeed, Springsteen personifies the stadium in the song: "I was raised outta steel here in the swamps of Jersey some misty years ago," he starts. Now, this might seem a little goofy and random. But keep in mind that Giants Stadium was being raised in Springsteen's home state just as his own career was taking off in the 1970s, and that he opened the Meadowlands' Brendan Byrne Arena (now the Izod Center) with six sold-out shows in 1981. These hulks of steel mean a lot to Springsteen-- they're his pulpit. And outlasting one of them is no small feat. Across "Wrecking Ball"'s six minutes, Springsteen is harkening back to his sprawling arrangements of yesteryear, and marking it with a glorious bridge that acknowledges the 62-year-old's mortality while defying it all the same. "Bring on your wrecking ball," he sings, over and over, relishing the joy of this ending.

"Land of Hope and Dreams", written around the time of the E Street reunion tour in 1999, follows suit-- it's sprawling at seven minutes and boasts not one but two prime Clemons solos. (In the Wrecking Ball booklet, Springsteen breaks down the duo's invaluable accomplishment: "Together, we told an older, richer story about the possibilities of friendship that transcend those I'd written in my songs and in my music.") This song is huge, not only in length but scope, and is imbued with an all-encompassing, arena-blowing bigness that Springsteen has shied away from in his new material for years. It rolls along using one of Bruce's favorite metaphors: the train. This is the one Curtis Mayfield was talking about on "People Get Ready" (which is called out here), the one critic Greil Marcus rhapsodized about in his essential tome Mystery Train, the one that welcomes all Americans regardless of class, race, creed. Coming out of Springsteen's mouth-- and Clemons' horn-- it's still a touching ideal, a testament of hope when we need it most. And for going on 40 years now, that's Bruce's job-- to remind us of what brings people together when everything around us seems hellbent on proving the opposite. Too hokey? Probably. But the true power of a song like "Land of Hope and Dreams" lies in its ability to overcome self-consciousness and cynicism, a feat that's tougher to achieve now than ever. Hard times come and go-- why spew anger when exultance is in your grasp?